Artistic Statement Quotes

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

Art needs to stand for something.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.

When I did 'Baby Got Back,' I did it to be unpopular.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

I'm a drag queen. I want colors that get attention. The world does not need another palette with eight tans and a blue.

All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.

I am a Communist. My painting is Communist painting.

My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements.

All my films are statements, especially when I write them.

My Paintings are Battles.

Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

According to one critic, my works looked like scraped billboards. I went to look at the billboards and decided that more billboards should be scraped.

Every artist has to make their own statements and they have to live with them.

The impulse for me to want to make sculpture is because I want to make statements, really, on a purely emotional level. And it's also somewhat of a challenge to see how that can be done with materials and objects that really are not emotional, in and of themselves.

For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don't have anything to say, you stop making art - you might start making product. And I'm interested in being an artist.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

I don't ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, 'It sounds good!' It's got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.

A method of painting is a natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

I have never painted a recent picture.

I didn't set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn't trying to be avant-garde - that's being fashionable. You don't set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself.